It's a play date.

From Xbox.com's Community Calendar:

Play the geezers from the Geezer Gamers website as they play the Xbox LIVE® community in Halo Wars™ on March 8. GeezerGamers is a community built for and by men and women in their thirties and beyond, who take great pleasure in playing video games. This is the generation (or the parents of the generation) that grew up playing Atari 2600, Intellivision, and the Commodore 64. Geezer Gamers is for all those with spouses/exes, kids, mortgages, who are gaining weight and medications, or losing hair and sanity. The overall mission is simple: "We want to provide a safe haven for gamers in their thirties and above to connect with other 'mature' gamers and get the most fun out of the Xbox LIVE experience."

Geezer Gamers will be online Sunday, March 8 from 8:00 – 11:00 P.M. ET (5:00 – 8:00 P.M. PT) playing Halo Wars.

I've been playing the Halo Wars demo since it released last week. I'm loving it. Even if I didn't have this commitment to buy the game, this would likely be a day one buy for me. (But it's nice to have an excuse.) It takes me back to the many hours I spent playing Warlords Battlecry and Star Trek Armada on the PC. Hopefully, my playing style won't limit me to playing only one or two games in the three-hour period — although, as far as the game is concerned, I'm already taking too long. The campaign awards you a medal based on your performance in the level, and one of the criteria is time to complete. My "build to excess" compulsion has thus far prevented me from earning a time bonus on the second mission. (The first mission has no building.)

Not that I mind, really. (Except I'd bet there's going to be an achievement or two buried in there somewhere.) Considering I'm having fun playing the game and spending as much time as possible with it, I think it's a good thing.

Is the game as complex as a PC-based RTS? Not by a long shot. There are things you can do on a PC that are hard to impossible on a console. But Ensemble did a pretty decent job in putting the essentials of a RTS on a console, and making it accessible.

I'm really looking forward to this game, not just playing it with the community, but playing the campaign beyond the first two demo levels. I can't wait for March.